Dead Beats Series

These pictures by photographer Larry Keenan serve as a personal memorial to a community of faces that have fallen away into invisible skin -- tributes to fallen friends in ink and paper, these portraits find their subject matter in the pioneers of the Beat Generation literary movement that extends back to the middle 1950s. Like all transcendental art, these pictures do not need any explanation or introduction. Instead, they move by themselves: animal-like and slow, moving through the misty evening across the cool diamond rivers of dusk. And like the very best photographs, they subsist on the sweet blood of memory, finding sustenance in the thirsty eye of each viewer, moving now on delicate deer hooves, moving into the flower garden where God sleeps. And in the end, we are there, too: finding a renewed faith in the ash of what once was.

-- John Aiello

This review appeared in the October 2003 edition of the Electric Review.Copyright John Aiello; all rights reserved.

NEAL CASSADY

Holy Goof Driver Merry Prankster1926-1968

Photographed at California College of Arts & CraftsWaiting for Kesey, looking out for the cops.